Voyage to Ithaka

I’ve been working on a book about my first year of teaching, and I think I’ve found a way to explain why it was so terrible. But I’ll have to start by telling you about The Odyssey.

It is the 2,700-year-old story of a Greek warrior and king, Odysseus. After ten years of fighting the Trojan War, he sets out with a fleet of ships to return to his wife and son on the island of Ithaka.  

But storms blow his ship off course. He encounters dangers and temptations of all kinds. Captured by the Cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus manages to put out the monster’s single eye and escape. But he can’t resist bragging about it, telling the blinded giant his true name and home island. Polyphemus begs his father, the sea-god Poseidon, to make the hero’s voyage home a hard one.

From that point on, Odysseus is dogged by misfortune. Giant cannibals called the  Laistrygonians destroy every ship in his fleet but his own. That last ship, with all his surviving crew, is smashed by a lightning bolt from Zeus. Odysseus reaches Ithaka only after ten more years of wandering.

In a modern poem called ‘Ithaka,’ inspired by The Odyssey, the Greek poet C. V. Cavafy gives any traveler advice on how to find his or her way home. At one point, he warns:

      ’The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
     Angry Poseidon -- you will not meet them
     Unless you carry them in your soul,
     Unless your soul raises them up before you.’

I realize now that my first year as a teacher was awful because I brought the Laistrygonians, the Cyclops, and angry Poseidon to school with me.

The Laistrygonians were my fears. In that first year,  I saw every problem -- from the demands on my 50-year-old body of a new schedule of eating and sleeping to the sleepy, surly teenagers I had to entice to pay attention -- as a monster that I was powerless to defeat.

The Cyclops was my arrogant belief that I needed no training or experience to do this difficult job. When I teach The Odyssey to my freshmen, I like to ask them why the Cyclops has only one eye?  It stumps them at first. They’re not used to questioning a text. Eventually, they start to think about what having one eye would mean -- the loss of depth perception, the lack of perspective.  One day, one of my students had an inspiration: ‘He never thinks about anyone but himself! He’s only got one ŒI’! ‘
     

Angry Poseidon was my resentment. I never expected I’d have to work so hard and so long.  I  never seemed able to catch up with, much less finish my planning and correcting and grading. It was not until halfway through that first year that I accepted and embraced the idea that, at least from September to June, all my time had to be dedicated to teaching. Ironically, when I let go of what I thought of as my ‘real life’ -- mornings with the newspaper, evenings of pleasure reading, weekends watching football games -- I began to enjoy my real life.
     

Fear, arrogance, and resentment were the chief ingredients in the bitter stew of those first months of teaching. Once those enemies were banished by experience, by training, and most of all by the friendship, love, and support of my wife and colleagues, my real voyage to Ithaka began.